Over a two-year period, Murdoch University post doctorate associate Neville Ellis interviewed 22 farmers from the Wheatbelt town of Newdegate, in Western Australia's Great Southern, about how they were responding emotionally and psychologically to climate change.

Mr Ellis specifically chose the Wheatbelt because it is one of the most climate change-affected parts of Australia, having lost 20 per cent of its winter rainfall since the 1970s.

Mr Ellis found farmers in the area had lost confidence in the consistency of weather patterns and their ability to predict them.

One woman even told me about putting herself to bed and pulling the doona over her face because she just couldn't stand watching... the land degrade like that.

Neville Ellis, post doctoral associate

"So what you see in these dry seasons is that farmers will be checking forecast 10, 20, 30 times a day. They just don't know what's coming on the horizon, so there's a degree of anxiety about what is coming their way."

Farmers had also described becoming obsessed with long range forecasts, tracking storm systems as far as the Horn of Africa right across the Indian Ocean to the Wheatbelt in the hope that they may bring rain.

One of the most significant findings from Mr Ellis' study was farmers' response to the degradation of their land due to wind erosion, which is a result of long, dry seasons.

"You see in times of wind erosion that farmers will actively shut themselves inside, close all the curtains in an attempt to remove themselves from an environment that is too painful to watch," Mr Ellis said.

"One woman even told me about putting herself to bed and pulling the doona over her face because she just couldn't stand watching the land blow, and she couldn't stand watching the land degrade like that."

Farmers suffering from a seasonal affective disorder, local GP says

Seasonal affective disorder usually affects those living in countries with long, dark winters and is generally associated with a lack of sunlight.

However, a general practitioner working in the Wheatbelt told Mr Ellis he believed farmers in the Wheatbelt were suffering a form of the disorder, not because of a lack of light but due to the lack of rain.

"Farmers were suffering from a seasonal pattern of distress because the rains just weren't coming like they used to," Mr Ellis said.

"So you can imagine a farmer plants a crop, they spend a lot of money putting that crop in and then they wait for the next rain to come and that tension and anxiety builds.

"And so you see this happening year after year after year and it becomes like a seasonal pattern."

NT Beverages, which received $10 million of taxpayer's money from an infrastructure fund that has since been abolished, was granted a water extraction licence just hours before entering into voluntary administration.